Staff Software Engineer (backend)

You’ll join the team primarily responsible for scaling the throughput and performance of the backend job processing system and code execution engines that power Tines’ intelligent workflows. However, since we’re still a small but growing software engineering organization, this role is not strictly limited to any single part of our product or stack.

This role is about more than writing code: you'll have an influential voice in shaping our technical direction, our product, and our culture. We have a hugely supportive and collaborative engineering team that takes great pride in the work we do and the challenges we solve. We’re eager to help grow and nurture each other’s abilities and also create an environment where we have the ability to do our very best work.

Location:  US Eastern states. 

You can work fully remotely from anywhere in EST states, with a preference for the Boston area. You can make use of our Tines office space in Boston to meet up with other members of the engineering team when you wish.

In this role, you’ll:

• Lead the technical direction for some of Tines’ most critical systems. 
• Make valuable changes in our codebase in your first week, and see them live in production minutes after merging them.
• Shape how jobs and code are executed at the very heart of our application, to help us power the world’s most important workflows.
• Write and review high-quality, well-tested code to ensure that we’re creating a stable product for our customers, and a stress-free codebase for ourselves.
• Identify areas for improvement, both in our codebase and in how we work, and share the responsibility of making our team better.
• Own the problems you’re solving - and the software you write to solve them - all the way to production and beyond, responding to customer feedback to improve those solutions.
• Use your knowledge to mentor other engineers in our team, providing support and guidance to help them grow their abilities.

Projects you might work on:

• Build robust, high-availability systems that can support massive data throughput requirements. 
• Improve action throughput to meet our growing customers’ scale.
• Create internal and customer-facing controls that allow Tines and our customers to configure job prioritization levels, ensuring the most critical workflows are executed in a timely manner.
• Build features that allow customers to execute code in our product.
• Ensure customers’ jobs are executed in a balanced and fair manner, particularly on multitenant stacks. 
• Write a blog post to share something interesting we learned with the community.

Is this role right for you?

• Typically 10+ years as a professional software engineer. Proven track record of success as a staff software engineer. We’re looking for candidates with a well of experience to draw from, including some of:
• Linux systems expertise in namespaces, file descriptors, Unix sockets, mounts, networking, and process isolation.
• Experience with container runtimes, orchestration, or code execution platforms.
• Filesystem and storage experience, including POSIX behavior, content-addressed storage, and crash recovery.
• Experience in building and owning low-level system primitives in Rust or Go.
• Strong debugging skills: able to build focused reproducers for complex kernel, runtime, and storage issues, and use logs, traces, metrics, and tests to isolate root cause.
• Your abilities matter, not your education or exactly where you’ve worked. We just need you to show us that you have accumulated the foundational skills and knowledge needed to succeed.
• This role is broad, not specialized. While your main focus will be on our backend job processing system and code execution engines, you’ll work across our stack, from infrastructure changes to the frontend. You don’t need to have experience in all of these areas, but you will need to be excited to pitch in anywhere when needed, with the support of your teammates. This allows us to be more effective as a team, and provides a lot of opportunities for you to learn.
• We’re focused on the most important problems, not the most interesting ones. Your time and energy are limited, so in order to succeed you’ll need to spend it where it will make a difference. We view technologies as a means to an end, and stick to simple, common tools - Ruby, Rails, React, TypeScript, Rust, Go, Postgres, Redis, AWS CDK, and Docker. 
• Engineer productivity is hugely important to us. We invest heavily in developer experience and care deeply about things like build times and flakey tests. We’re constantly evaluating and refining our use of LLMs to make us more effective in building our product. 
• We work healthily and sustainably. We work reasonable hours, we take our holidays and we plan our workloads realistically. No matter how excited we get by a project, it’s more important to not get burnt out from overwork.
• Your contributions will be obvious. On a small team like ours, you don’t have to spend a ton of time and energy making sure your work is seen - your impact will be clear to everyone.
• We’re building an inclusive, supportive team. We have a wonderfully wide spectrum of colleagues at Tines, and we treat them all with kindness and respect - we expect that you will too. We don’t hire people that treat their colleagues badly, no matter how talented they are.